


but grace can still be found within the gale

by feralphoenix



Category: Tales of Legendia
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From every angle things are crystal clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but grace can still be found within the gale

**Author's Note:**

> _(the dying of a small god inside you_ – daughters and heirs)

She’s been watching the play of light on the water’s surface from beneath it since she was a small, small child, so small that she can’t even remember the first time that she saw it.

To her, freshwater has always tasted sweet—sweet like candy or like fresh bread. And even though freshwater was the only kind she tasted for a long, long time, she never really got used to it. She got tired of the taste, yes: Tired of it very quickly, because it was like a ritual, like prayer, to wake time and time again to sweetness pressing down on her lungs, filling her, the kiss of a prince from an Orerines fairy tale to wake her from Nerifes’ curse.

But the light on the surface of the water was beautiful. Shirley would lie at the bottom of every clear spring with her hair beginning to phosphoresce and think so, and keep breathing the water that she despaired of but couldn’t bring herself to hate, and postpone shattering its wavy mirror for a little longer.

 

All of her memories of her sister hurt, and she wonders if Stella would like that.

The relationship between them was never easy or comfortable, and Shirley tells herself to be fair and that it couldn’t have been easy for Stella, either, having to be older sister to the Merines. The elder had named Stella after the brightest star of the night, matching with the name their parents had given her, but Shirley thought that the elder was probably wrong. On the surface, Stella had been so bright, but really she was opaque, unknowable, like the flat surface of the calm sea at night.

Or maybe Shirley simply can’t help but think so because she loves and hates Stella so much, even as a memory.

People flocked to Shirley with looks of admiration and prayer because she was the Merines, but when people had gathered around Stella it was because her sister was beautiful and strong. People loved Shirley for what she meant; people loved Stella because of what Stella could do, all on her own. She can trace it back to her earliest memories, from back before it occurred to her to be jealous of Stella, from back before Stella took the only thing that Shirley had ever wanted for herself and paraded Senel triumphant and patronizing before Shirley at every opportunity.

She didn’t have a name for the feeling then, but she thinks it might have been despair. People never saw her but for the pedestal they placed her on and the chains of expectation and responsibility they strung about her like garlands, but Stella shone in her blackness, Stella never had trouble getting people to see what she wanted them to see when they looked at her.

The proof: When Nerifes killed her powers, when she wouldn’t be the doll they wanted, the villagers turned away from Shirley in disgust; when Stella failed and fell, she was mourned.

The night that they thought Stella had been murdered by the soldiers, Shirley remembers crying so violently that her stomach rebelled. She distinctly remembers clinging to the side of the longboat, pain the only feeling in her fingers, with bile burning her throat and the back of her nose and tears nearly blinding her and her skin stinging from the salt wind of the sea.

That night, she couldn’t remember even one time that Stella was ever kind to her. There surely had been times when her sister had shown her kindness, had stood up for her against the villagers’ sharp words and hard hands, but none of those times would float into her mind. Only the bullying, the passive-aggressive smiles, the myriad ways she had flaunted her perfection time and time again. But still, Stella had put herself in the way of the soldiers’ steel, and specifically told Senel to protect her, Shirley.

Years later, holding Stella’s lovely white hand as her sister’s heart slowed down and stopped—she wouldn’t cry (for it was Senel’s turn to grieve), but she wondered the same things that she had wondered on that cold awful night, the salt of her tears no match for the salt of Stella’s black ocean, water going on forever in every direction.

Maybe—Stella had hated and loved her, too, had despaired at her inability to escape Shirley’s shadow, too. Shirley would never have the chance to find out.

 

Thyra is an iron eren, unlike her older sister. Automata aren’t magnetized to her, like they were to Walter and Fenimore. Every morning, it seems as though she has a private ritual of going through the kata of her people’s ancient hand-to-hand style.

When Shirley is visiting the Ferines village for diplomatic things and winds up having to stay overnight, she likes to get up early to watch. At first she was met with a lot of shouting and insults—she is still met with shouting and insults sometimes—but she has always promised to stay out of the way and to get out of Thyra’s line of sight if her presence is distracting, and Thyra has never yet forced her to leave.

According to Maurits, and to Shirley’s own research exploring the Legacy, it wasn’t until the arrival of the Orerines that their people developed such an art. So little of the planet’s land mass was over the surface of the water prior to the Orerines’ terraforming that there was no need to develop intricate arts that could only be useful on land.

Shirley wonders to herself just how much of the knowledge had to be given to the Ferines, or stolen from the Orerines, before they could develop martial arts. There seems to be so much understanding of physics and of biology that must go into deciding how to shape one’s fists or where to direct a blow, and when the ancestors of the Orerines came to Melfes, they had certainly had a large head start.

The people of the present may never learn just how much the two peoples imprinted each other across the eons, changed each other irrevocably. Even the Legacy can’t possibly tell the entire story. But Shirley thinks that it might be nice to know.

Maybe one day she’ll be able to talk about these things to Thyra, too, instead of just her seven comrades. Right now, if she broached the subject, Thyra might refuse to believe her, or quit practicing martial arts on the spot. She’s too raw, and she’s harder, sharper than Fenimore ever was. Pain and hatred have seeped right down into the fissures of her, and smoothing them out will take time.

One day, in the far future.

The swift, powerful movements of Thyra’s hands and feet are beautiful. It’s almost as if she can sense and shape the air like any Ferines’ unity with water currents. Silhouetted against the sunrise, she is even more beautiful and majestic than Senel.

 

Sometimes at night Shirley thinks of how miraculous it is that two different species from two different planets could have developed such the same.

The Orerines can’t sense changes in the water, can’t taste mineral differences in it so subtly. Their lungs can only breathe the air, and their only bioluminescence is the shine of eres in their nails, and their skin and hair come in a dizzying array of different colors, but they’re so similar to the Ferines, otherwise. Take the clothes off a man and a woman of either species, and but for coloring you wouldn’t be able to distinguish one from the other.

That first time she’d lingered at Senel’s house until late, he’d been dubious that it would even work, doubting that their bodies would be able to fit together. She smiled at him, a little sadly and a little gratefully, for all the things he’d never had to learn; he’d been confused, and she thought of all the secrets Stella had imposed and asked him if he really wanted her to tell him. He’d thought about it, sobered, and said that he could guess. It sounded like an apology. He was a soldier, too.

She wonders if someday, once they marry, they’ll be able to have a child. It would be a step forward for their entire world if it were possible, if their bodies aren’t that little bit too different. She wonders if that someday’s dream of a child would be able to breathe water as well as air, if its hair would glow or just its nails.

But there is so much to do before that can even become a concern, so she doesn’t wonder so much.

When she’s done visiting, she dresses and gathers up her things; Senel always watches her from the bed, wearing the same perplexed expression, hair sticking out in every direction.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t just move in,” he always says.

She always smiles, because he might never, and because it’s all right if he doesn’t. It’s enough that he loves her at all; he doesn’t need to know and love everything there is to her. “I will, someday; this is just something I want to do for myself first.”

He always smiles back then, lopsided and sleepy, and she loves him for his faith in her. “Well, you know where I am if you need anything.”

“I do,” she replies, and says “good night,” and walks down the stairs and leaves the house before he falls asleep. At night the air of Werites Beacon is crisp and salty, and it feels good to stand on her own two feet and breathe it.

 

She’s been watching the play of light on the water’s surface from beneath it since she was a small, small child, so small that she can’t even remember the first time that she saw it.

After all this time, she still expects breathing seawater to hurt. Its taste in the back of her throat is sharp, severe, unforgiving. It’s comfortable, and it’s frightening; there’s always that part of her that reminds her she’s pulling poison into her lungs with each breath, that Nerifes’ curse will boil her flesh and drag her into the pelagic depths and that will be the end of her.

She breathes it in nonetheless, holds the sea foam in her chest like it’s a gift. It prickles at her, metallic, electric, and she feels like a person when it envelopes her body.

Above her, the surface ripples and shimmers like the world above is a jewel, painting ribbons of sunlight along her arms. Shirley loves it as much as she’s loved anything.


End file.
